The background: We had planned today to write about Lianne La Havas, the new Jools Holland-sanctioned Brit soul girl due to support Bon Iver in the States this December, but we didn't get the SoundCloud tracks for you to hear in time, and so we sort of semi-facetiously (what, us?) decided to do Ren Harvieu instead because we were able to secure songs from her, and because we thought, hey, you know, one Brit soul girl is much like another. We thought we'd end the week on a fun, up note, with a less-than-oblique point about the relentless, tedious cavalcade of big-voiced girls paraded before us by the music industry in the wake of Amy and Adele.

And then we heard those Ren Harvieu songs and we realised we had got her completely wrong (what, us?). To say they're not what we expected would be to do a disservice to irony and understatement. We anticipated yet another foghorn belter standing unadorned at the mic and wailing a series of unimaginative, unimaginably uninspired 12-bar blues or country moanathons – not these massive strings-drenched ballads that pay lip service to the mid-60s era of those solo artists with single names like Dusty, Lulu, Cilla and Sandie and the sort of epic tunes they would have blasted out on Sunday Night at the London Palladium or during a royal command performance. Open Up Your Arms, due to be the second single from this new Island signing in early 2012, is fabulous, and reminds us, if anything, of the Last Shadow Puppets – ie neo-60s MOR, only with a grain of a nod and a wink from the indie/alternative side of the fence to appease those uncomfortable with her being straight mainstream fodder. It's within a golden hair's breath of bearing comparison with the retro pastiche genius of LSP's Standing Next To Me.

It comes as no surprise, then, to discover that Harvieu has been working with Dave McCabe (the Zutons), Ed Harcourt, Howie Payne (ex-the Stands) and James Allan (Glasvegas). OK, that makes sense. Suddenly, not only is Harvieu not just another karaoke screecher, she's an indie girl with ambitions to recast herself as a 21st-century MOR queen. That's way more intriguing. This way she becomes a vehicle for the ambitions of Spector/Bacharach/Walker Bros fanboys like Allan who have been trying to foist their vision of 60s pop on the nation to little commercial avail and now may have found the perfect avatar (notice how, in one sentence, Harvieu went from being a car to the embodiment of an abstract concept). We've also learned that Harvieu's childhood heroes included the Smiths, and that makes sense too, because Open Up Your Arms reminds us of those few occasions when that band showed their love of big camp 60s pop. In fact, Johnny Marr was one of the first to contact the 21-year-old when he found out this summer that she'd had a terrible accident and wound up in hospital.

Wait a sec – back up. Accident? Hospital! Yes, in May this year, just as Island were poised to release her debut album and she was about to record a duet with rapper Nas and perform at Glastonbury, Harvieu broke her back in a freak collision with a mate during a night of harmless hi-jinks in a park. She ended up with two vertebrae sticking through her clothes and faced the prospect of being wheelchair-bound for the rest of her life. By some miracle, here we are barely six months on and not only is Harvieu walking, albeit with crutches, she's armed with a clutch of fabulous quasi-classics and a bright future, perhaps as the missing link between Shirley Bassey and Adele. Better still, think of her as a homegrown Shelby Lynne pouring her heart and soul into Your Lies, backed by the combined talents of The Smiths and the London Philharmonic Orchestra. It seems churlish to nitpick about whether or not Harvieu had any role in the songwriting – whether it's the vampy Tonight or the Lana Del Ray-rivalling torch song noir of Forever in Blue – but the least you can say about her is that she's had the wherewithal to place herself in an interesting context. And at least Glasvegas get to finally have a hit.

The buzz: "Yes, it's AOR, music your mam would probably like, whatever – there's a void in the market opened up by Adele's massive gob and it needs filling. And fast. Ren might just be the girl to do it" – thelineofbestfit.com.